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Other bits. Another library issue: we are very overdue for an officially-sanctioned regex library. This is a fundamental omission in the Web era. Even C++ is on the cusp of getting one, for heaven's sake. There's a PCRE wrapper in the excellent JEDI open source library - I suggest CodeGear starts negotiating for a borrow.

Tuples are record types that you make up on the fly, and can then pass around and interpret in distant pieces of code. They are like variant arrays with the stigma removed.

Andreas Hausladen is one of a coterie of Delphi nutters heroes who have made using it bearable during years of Borland neglect, and are still at it. For example, last week Mr Hausladen devised a patch for a key but sluggish Delphi database library that improves its performance by up to ten times. If Hausladen et al can regularly do this sort of thing by reverse engineering binaries, what could they achieve if a way was found to give them access to the code generator source? New thinking for new times, CodeGear.

Erlang has arbitrary-sized integer arithmetic, so one can calculate 12345678987654321 * 98765432123456789 precisely. I don't think this is particularly useful, but it is cool, and implementing it gives the CodeGear boys something to do with their endless free time.

One last thing. This brave new dialect of Pascal will need a new name. We need to move on from the old quarrels about whether it is called 'Delphi' or not. Nor will the anagrammatic approach of the aforementioned Erlang cut the mustard (had you spotted that? It's 'Angler' really, of course). We need to find a moniker that suggests freshness, goodness and respect. I have just the thing.

So, CodeGear, when do you think you will be ready to ship Obama Pascal? ®